Another bad hair day for the New Jersey SPCA

I wrote recently about that news conference in which a colonel from the New Jersey SPCA told Jersey drivers they could face a fine for every unrestrained animal in their cars.

Afterward, I heard from dozens of New Jerseyans who pronounced themselves amazed that the members of a private animal-advocacy group can bestow military ranks on each other, and carry guns and make arrests.

They’d be even more amazed if they knew how badly these guys scared the owner of Oscar and Fifi.

Judy Podpalka is a 52-year-old retired federal employee who recently moved back to her childhood home in Woodbridge from Florida. While there, she picked two dogs of a breed that originated in Cuba, the Havanese.

Fifi is a silky Havanese and Oscar is a corded Havanese. The “corded” refers to the dog’s coat. As it grows in, the owner is supposed to arrange the hair into a style reminiscent of a rastaman’s dreadlocks.

Or so says the American Kennel Club. The New Jersey SPCA has other ideas. Podpalka learned that in October. Two weeks after she moved back to Woodbridge, she heard someone pounding on the door.

“They didn’t ring the doorbell like normal people,” she recalled. “They banged on the door.”

When she opened it, Podpalka confronted a guy who “was wearing a black uniform and carrying a big black gun,” she said.

“He presented himself like a DEA agent, you know the way they come and bang down your door,” she said. “He truly scared me.”

The guy said he was an officer with the New Jersey SPCA and demanded to see Oscar. When she brought him out, the guy began taking pictures of him.

“I said to him, ‘My dog is extremely pampered,’ ” she said. “ ‘Why are you wasting my time and my tax dollars?’ ”

Oscar smiles for the camera

Actually, he wasn’t wasting her tax dollars. Way back in 1868, the Legislature permitted the SPCA to collect half the revenues from fines collected for violation of the animal cruelty statutes. That’s described in the State Commission of Investigation report issued in 2001. The report listed 200 pages worth of abuses and decried the “archaic legislative scheme that places the enforcement of animal cruelty laws in the hands of unsupervised, volunteer groups of private citizens.”

The SPCA must have good lobbyists, however, because that “archaic scheme” is still in effect in 2012. Podpalka learned that last month when she took her two dogs to a dog walk sponsored by a local animal shelter.

“You know those people who push the dog around in the baby carriage?” she said. “That’s me. I’m the one who never had any children and spends thousands on the dogs.”

That wasn’t good enough for the armed NJSPCA officer who came up to the carriage and told her he’d gotten a complaint about the Oscar’s hairdo. At this point, Podpalka started to get ticked off.

“I said, ‘Out of all these dogs here, most of them are pit bulls,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘You come up to me and I’ve got my dog in a baby carriage? Try and get a pit bull into a baby carriage.’ ”

Ah yes, pit bulls. Someone has to keep those and other potentially vicious animals in check. A lot of people think that’s the SPCA.

Podpalka learned otherwise last week when she called to complain that a pit bull was running loose near her home, threatening to turn her prized pets into Cuban sandwiches.

“The guy says, ‘I can’t help you because the dog’s not being abused,’ ” she said. “Call Animal Control.”

All of this sounded nutty, even by New Jersey standards, so I put in a call to the spokesman for the NJSPCA, Sgt. Frank Saracino. When I asked about the officers who inquired about Oscar’s hair style, Saracino said they were merely enforcing a state statute that requires dogs to be groomed.

“The officer would just go there and say, ‘Why isn’t the dog groomed?’ ” he said.

That’s nice, but there is no law requiring you to get your dog groomed. Saracino conceded that after he looked through the statutes, most of which date from a 19th-century effort to protect farm and draft animals, not pets.

What about that pit bull running loose?

“That would be an Animal Control issue, not something we would take up,” he replied.

At this point, I’m sure you’re thinking what I’m thinking: If Animal Control controls animals, then why do we need armed SPCA officers?

If anyone has an answer to that, I’d love to hear it. So would Fifi and Oscar.